DJT, Vance, Musk and company have been in the ultimate seats of power for a month.

After quitting social media in 2021, I dipped back in as one of a dozen million people who joined the open source social media app BlueSky after the election.

Can you say “dozen million?” – sounds funny because of the end alliteration. Well, 12 million people.

BlueSky went from 12 million to 24 million users in my first month on the site, November 24th to December 24th. It has slightly more than 31 million users now.

In my three months using it, I learned it was a sanctuary space before I joined: a creative space and safe space for people of all types. I learned that its open source construction led to a collective creation of tools that allow for better, more nuanced blocking, muting and white/blacklisting. It’s a positive community of well-grouped threads and feeds. I really like it there. sweet.

I don’t belong, but that’s not BlueSky’s fault.

I don’t belong on X/Twitter, FB, IG, TikTok, or any other social media.

My experience on BlueSky these past three months merely confirmed it.

I’ve never had a Facebook account, and was on Twitter, pre-Musk, for exactly ten years (from April 4, 2011 to April 4, 2021). I have an Instagram account for Giants Baseball Corner, but I’ve never used it.

I told myself I was participating in Twitter to observe the pulse of the community, nation and eventually world. I joined in 2011, year of the “Arab Spring,” in which Twitter played such a predominant role.

But ultimately I found it to be a distraction I no longer wish to engage in. So, I stopped posting after ten years. Then Elon bought it.

When Twitter was fresh it was cool. But it’s well and truly rotten now. Muskified.

I sought that feeling of fresh Twitter when I joined BlueSky and it has that, but with 31 million users, it is an exponentially smaller community than X, and users are mostly in the United States – Japan, England, maybe.

By contrast, X has 600 million users around the world.

When you make a noise there, it’s a wake wave on a lake, as opposed to the shared laughs we have in our pond of ripples on BlueSky.

Because most people have an X/Twitter experience in their rear-view mirror, the composition of the BlueSky community comes with a built-in cultural protection. If I am posting there, I’m consciously trying not to spoil it. I find myself tempered knowing the community is sane.

But I realized that, having been off social media (or socials, as they’re now called), I just don’t know how to communicate properly on them. Instead, I overshare precious material, like and repost my echo chamber’s stuff and only once in a while find valuable reading material.

And it’s a huge time suck. No, I’ll stick with blogging thanks very much.

It’s late February and this is my first post of the year because I’ve been traveling, and in studio making art and contemplating what I am going to participate in.

At the moment, I am in studio working on oil painting, large collage pieces and starting to write again.

I expect I need to isolate even more to do some of this stuff, and I can.

so …

see ya when I see ya

mtk